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Manifesterende øjeblikke: del 1, Avantgardisterne

F.T. Marinetti: Futurist Manifesto (1909)

’The poet must spend himself with ardour, splendour,
and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervour of the promordial elements …

Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive
character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on
unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man …

We will glorify war - the world’s only
hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers,
beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman …

We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight
moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice …The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our
work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us
in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts – we want it to happen!’

Tristan Tzara: Dada Manifesto (1918):

’I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in
principle I am against manifestos, as I am also against principles (half-pints
to measure the moral value of every phrase too too convenient; approximation
was invented by the impressionists). I write this manifesto to show that people
can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am
against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither
for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense …We have thrown out the cry-baby in us. Any infiltration of this kind is candied
diarrhea. To encourage this act is to digest it. What we need is works that are
strong straight precise and forever beyond understanding. Logic is a
complication. Logic is always wrong. It draws the threads of notions, words, in
their formal exterior, towards illusory ends and centres. Its chains kill, it
is an enormous centipede stifling independence. Married to logic, art would
live in incest, swallowing, engulfing its own tail, still part of its own body,
fornicating within itself, and passion, would become a nightmare tarred with
Protestantism, a monument, a heap of ponderous grey entrails …

DADA; acquaintance with all the means hitherto
rejected by the sexual prudishness of easy compromise and good manners; DDA;
abolition of logic, dance of those who are incapable of creation: DADA; every
hierarchy and social equation established for values by our valets: DADA; every
object, all objects, feelings and obscurities, every apparition and precise
shock of parallel lines, are means for the battle of: DADA; the abolition of
memory: DADA; the abolition of archaeology: DADA; the abolition of prophets:
DADA: the abolition of future.’

André Breton: Surrealist Manifesto (1924)

‘The mind of the dreaming man is fully satisfied with
whatever happens to it. The agonizing question of possibility does not arise.
Kill, plunder more quickly, love as much as you wish. And if you die, are you
not sure of being roused from the dead? Let yourself be led. Events will not
tolerate deferment. You have no name everything is inestimably easy …

I believe in the future resolution of these two states –outwardly so
contradictory – which are dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, a
surreality, so to speak …

Let us resolve, therefore: the Marvellous is always beautiful, everything marvelous
is beautiful. Nothing but the Marvellous is beautiful.